Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

Rush opens Part 3 with a dispatch from the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, located in Oregon’s Central Cascades. It is one of 28 Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) centers found throughout the country. These centers allow researchers to study climate change. Several centers, including the Andrews, also have Long-Term Ecological Reflections programs, where writers reside at the center for two weeks and record their responses to the same set of study sites. These writings generate a “creative record of the changing relationship between people and forests over time” (188). Rush is participating in this program.

In this chapter, Rush introduces readers to the rufous hummingbird, which is the size of a spool of thread. These birds travel 5,000 miles each year between their breeding grounds in the Pacific Northwest and their wintering grounds in marshes located in Mexico and the Gulf Coast. By 2080, this hummingbird will lose all its nonbreeding ranges in the United States. As readers have seen throughout the text, the hummingbirds are already losing some of this habitat. Rush asks, “If the rufous don’t have a place to live come January, will they return to the Andrews in May?” (190).

To better understand how changes to climate are influencing the movement of the breeding birds throughout the Andrews, researchers have set up a long-term study.